Tea at Trianon: The Deep State Diplomats Who Failed

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 19, 2026

The Deep State Diplomats Who Failed

From Amuse on X:

On April 15, 2026, TIME published a piece by Philip Wang carrying the headline “It’s Not Working: Diplomats Fear Trump’s Iran Envoys Are Making Things Worse.” The article rests almost entirely on three named former officials, Aaron David Miller, David Satterfield, and Robert Einhorn, who are presented as sober experts watching amateurs fumble a delicate file. The framing is familiar. The evidentiary basis is weaker than the framing suggests. It is worth walking through what these three men actually did in government, what they did not do, and what the record shows about the men they are criticizing. Once that is done, a further question comes into view. It concerns whether the category “experienced diplomat” is doing the analytical work Wang assumes it is doing, and whether, in fact, the opposite proposition may be closer to the truth.
Begin with Miller. He spent 24 years at the State Department, from 1978 to 2003, advising six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His principal file was the Syria-Israel track. That track produced no agreement during his tenure. The Camp David summit in July 2000, at which he was present, collapsed. Miller has been candid about this record. His own CNN biography describes him as having spent “a couple decades in and around failing Arab-Israeli negotiations,” and his 2008 book is titled “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” In a History News Network essay, he wrote that he knows “a thing or two about failure.” This is not a partisan characterization. It is his self-description. A reader is entitled to ask why a man who acknowledges having worked on failed negotiations for thirty years is positioned by TIME as the benchmark against which current envoys should be measured.
Consider next Satterfield. He is associated in the public mind with the Israel-Lebanon maritime border agreement, and he did work on an early framework for those talks between 2017 and 2019. But the agreement itself was signed on October 27, 2022, and it was brokered by Amos Hochstein, not by Satterfield. AIPAC credited Hochstein by name. Al Jazeera credited Hochstein by name. Satterfield was one of at least four American envoys who handled the file over a period of years, and he was not the one in the room when it closed. His more recent work is also worth noting. From October 2023 to May 2024, he served as President Biden’s Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues. In December 2024, he told CBS News that Trump was “exaggerating” Turkey’s influence over Syrian rebel forces. Wang does not disclose the Biden role or the CBS appearance to his readers.(Read more.)